A federal court judge sided Tuesday with a homeless coalition and said Ohio must count provisional ballots cast on Nov. 6 that lack or contain incomplete voter identification information.Secretary of State Jon Husted promptly said his office would appeal the ruling to the Cincinnati-based U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals.
On Saturday, county boards of elections will begin to count roughly 200,000 provisional ballots, the ballots of last resort cast on Election Day by voters whose eligibility was in question for a variety of reasons. Voters are given 10 days after the election to correct, if possible, the problem with the ballot.
The official count must be completed by Nov. 27.At issue in the lawsuit was a section of the form that Mr. Husted released as part of the directive that ordered elections boards to reject provisional ballots that are incomplete, and required the voter, rather than the poll worker, to record the form of ID being used, said Subodh Chandra, one of the lawyers who filed the motion.
U.S. District Court Judge Algenon Marbley ruled Tuesday that the last-minute voting directive issued the Friday before the election was confusing and unfair to voters and violated a previous decree that made poll workers responsible for that information, as well as Ohio and constitutional law.

I’m wondering how Republicans will square their new interest in attracting younger and browner voters with the voter fraud industry they’ve built. What happens to the voter fraud media celebrities like John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky if Republicans make a serious effort to court the same group of voters Fund, Spakovsky and others smear almost daily?

True the Vote was a huge, over-hyped flop in Ohio, they weren’t even allowed into Ohio polling places because they didn’t manage to complete the credentialing process by election day. Contrast that with the huge volunteer voter protection effort by liberals and Democrats that we’ve had in place in Ohio for the last 4 cycles that has operated almost completely under national media radar. Maybe True the Vote should have spent less time holding conventions where conservative celebrities were paid to appear and more time learning the rules for polling place observers in Ohio and other swing states.

Republicans have spent ten years and millions of dollars promoting bogus claims of voter impersonation fraud, they have an entire cadre of media celebrities who push voter fraud, and now they have to attract the same groups of voters those same media celebrities insult and smear. Be interesting to see how they pull that off.

I hope in all their hubris and flood of money that they never make the connection here. Screw the vote did almost as much for our GOtV efforts as we did and it seems like the media was just starting to admit that the whole thing was a GOP run fraud designed to disenfranchise certain types of people.

It will be a shame if Screw the Vote gets its act together but it is a possibility we need to be prepared for. People need to be reminded regularly that the GOP does not really want them to vote and when they get the opportunity as they have in Florida and Ohio they will use any means necessary to subvert the rule of law.

I spent four days working to GOTV in central Columbus. In the precincts I worked almost 25 percent of votes cast were forced into the provisional ballot pipeline.

Husted and the GOP did everything they could to suppress the vote in Ohio. Rove thought it would work and that’s why he had his Fox News meltdown. And he might have been successful if it wasn’t for folks like you, Kay, fighting the suppression efforts every step of the way and the targets of that effort voting in overwhelming numbers. I had more than one person tell me that nothing would stop their community from voting.

The blowback from the suppression effort won Ohio. Now if we can hold the coalition together for 2014 then we can deliver some payback to the weasels who worked so hard to block the vote.

By lying, cheating and stealing as they usually do. (I hear a lot about conservatives values like honor and integrity, but I rarely see any of those supposedly conservative values in practice by identified conservatives. ‘It’s just politics’ as Bush the Younger had it.)

At any rate, the segregationist termites are going to be at it again here soon enough. I say we give them federal ID (supposedly Shumer and Graham are working on this) and automatic registration of voters with said ID. (And we allow insist homeless people to get ID as well, identifying the zip code they reside in if nothing else.)

But we really need to insist on this as a condition of delaying or repealing the defense sequester.

max
[‘We really should just get together a grocery list of stuff we want and offer to extend the Bush tax cuts to Feb. 14, 2014 in return for said list. Things like statehood for Puerto Rico and the like.’]

I don’t think either conservatives in general or the grifters in particular will ease up much because the barriers to voting they are pushing target poor people, who tend to vote Democratic, and who are more likely to be non-white, at least for the time being. They won’t stop until there is a general revulsion in the population. That might take a while because a lot of people don’t want to hear that America is still not the greatest democracy ever. On the upside, Kay and everyone else who did such a great job in Ohio in this cycle have shown that the grifters can be beaten by hard grassroots work.

Speaking of grifters I decided for the heck of it to click on the ad that has been appearing here a lot lately about an “urgent national poll!” Should Congress give Obama what he wants? You may want to sit down as what I found will shock you! Seriously, sit down 8-{D

The poll is worded in the most inflammatory way possible so I clicked ‘yes’ and provided a dead email address. I discovered that 88% of those polled want Congress to stop Obama now! (shocking!) also a video about horrid government agents coming to take your money! (I didn’t watch it so I guess I’ll just be a victim). And I had automatically agreed to receive a newsletter! Lee Bellinger’s executive bulletin Which I bet will have many great offers for gold coins if my guess is right.

See! I told you this would be shocking! I do wish I could add more exclamation points! Just to indicate how shocked I was!

edit: I hope BJ gets two cents from this clown for my having clicked the ad

I really feel that the True the Vote “movement” was really meant merely to placate and occupy the old geezers on the right–not the money people but the actual voters and gripers. It served the same function as a seal of approval on a product, or the pictures of Bush as a compassionate conservative hugging black people. The entire thing was put up as a projection and deflection whose goal was to reassure the voters that democratic voter fraud was a real thing and that the GOP was doing something about it that didn’t look exactly like voter suppression. Just like periodically, in the Bush years, Republican politicians would pretend to be less than fully hostile to the good minorities in order to convince the soccer moms that they could vote republican and not be considered racist. I’m actually kind of surprised that the True the Vote movement, such as it was, ever got to the point of making gestures and feints at being physically present in any particula rpolling place. I think they were just a massive head fake, along the lines of an Andrew Breitbart/O’Keefe video meant to take down the democrats with a tiny investment.

It takes a long time. They didn’t really have an effective voter protection plan until 2006 (inspired by the voter ID law of 2005) and it’s gotten better every year. Voter protection gets ignored by media, compare the space given to True the Vote (mostly hype and bluster) and the space given to voter protection efforts (real) which I’ve come around to thinking is a good thing for voter protection :)

The claims were outlandish on their face. A million volunteers is a LOT. That’s an enormous undertaking. We had +/- 1500 trained in Ohio in 2012 and that took years. Most of ours were returnees, they had done the work before.

@aimai: I (mostly) agree. The lack of feet-on-the-ground, the unfamiliarity with and disinterest in the actual rules in Ohio, the media noise, the dog-whistles, all point to a propaganda tactic rather than reality. Doonesbury had the right response, I think, pointing out straightforwardly that this is no more than a revival of our old pal, Mr. Jim Crow.

Now if we can hold the coalition together for 2014 then we can deliver some payback to the weasels who worked so hard to block the vote.

How exactly is this going to work to win a substantial additional number of House seats in 2014 in an off-year election in most states if we couldn’t win them in a Presidential year? Actually, the inverse is true: unless we can hold the coalition together for 2014, we risk at least a milder version of 2010 in which the weasels succeed in winning an increment of congressional seats back for team red. The problem is that 2010 enabled team red to win control of enough state houses to do a decade’s worth of structural damage that in most states, we won’t have a chance to undo until after the 2020 elections.

When I vote in elections here in Canada I mark an X on a paper ballot with a pencil. Prior to a federal or provincial election an enumerator comes around to the house and confirms my name and address, no ID is asked for. For some reason, we have been able to avoid the clusterfuck system that has been imposed on US voters.

“True the Vote should have spent less time holding conventions where conservative celebrities were paid to appear and more time learning the rules for polling place observers in Ohio and other swing states.”

What’s funny is that if the bottom rung of probably decent but misguided poll watchers were to learn how voting actually works, and that what they were then told to do was essentially voter suppression and disenfranchisement, they might, might, discover they’d been lied to by TrueTheVote.

Contrast that with the huge volunteer voter protection effort by liberals and Democrats that we’ve had in place in Ohio for the last 4 cycles that has operated almost completely under national media radar.

Actually, the inverse is true: unless we can hold the coalition together for 2014, we risk at least a milder version of 2010 in which the weasels succeed in winning an increment of congressional seats back for team red. The problem is that 2010 enabled team red to win control of enough state houses to do a decade’s worth of structural damage that in most states, we won’t have a chance to undo until after the 2020 elections.

This. This is all true. 2014 is going to need a massive GOTV just to hold ground and to try to flip some statewide seats from R to D. It’s going to do diddly squat for taking control of the House.

GOTV is going to be needed – but it’s needed so that Dems can take control at the state level like California has managed this year. Even that will be hard – the new state districts were just drawn and they’ll make it as bad as the House for gaining ground in state legislatures. But the statewide offices need to be grabbed and held as much as possible between now and 2020.

QFT, not just with regard to Screw the Vote but with regard to everything the GOP does that involves electoral politics. I was heartened by Kay’s and Aimai’s analysis in the previous thread of the structural differences between the Dem and GOP electoral efforts, but there was a lot of overoptimism in that thread — and I say this as someone who tends to be overoptimistic herself.

We can only hope that RW groups like Screw the Vote continue to spend their money and effort unwisely, we can only hope that the GOP never effectively changes its authoritative and organizational campaign structures, and we can only hope that the GOP continues to run candidates who are so flat-out personally repugnant (cf. Mitt Romney and Joe Walsh) that it makes no fucking difference how many billions the Citizens United decision frees up to be poured into ad campaigns supporting them (and lambasting their opponents). And while we hope, we need to remain prepared for not getting what we hope for. The term “it’ll never happen” cannot be allowed into our collective vocabulary (we need look no further than the Romney campaign to see how well that kind of thinking serves its adherents). We can’t take anything for granted. One 2010 was too many as it is.

QFT, not just with regard to Screw the Vote but with regard to everything the GOP does that involves electoral politics. I was heartened by Kay’s and Aimai’s analysis in the previous thread of the structural differences between the Dem and GOP electoral efforts, but there was a lot of overoptimism in that thread — and I say this as someone who tends to be overoptimistic herself.

We can only hope that RW groups like Screw the Vote continue to spend their money and effort unwisely, we can only hope that the GOP never effectively changes its authoritative and organizational campaign structures, and we can only hope that the GOP continues to run candidates who are so flat-out personally repugnant (cf. Mitt Romney and Joe Walsh) that it makes no fucking difference how many billions the Citizens United decision frees up to be poured into ad campaigns supporting them (and lambasting their opponents). And while we hope, we need to remain prepared for not getting what we hope for. The term “it’ll never happen” cannot be allowed into our collective vocabulary (we need look no further than the Romney campaign to see how well that kind of thinking serves its adherents). We can’t take anything for granted. One 2010 was too many as it is.

@double nickel: We’d have that too if we had officials half of whom don’t actually want everyone to vote and a populace where half of them hadn’t been trained to fear government having any information about them.

Boy I’m just stunned by the overwhelming incompetence of the GOP top to bottom. Romney’s big GOTV app fails, their pollsters fail, their analysts fail to see the writing on the polling wall, their SuperPAC’s fail, and their supress the vote organizations fail. Add that to their Congressional representatives, who fail at everything, including writing and passing legislation, and you’ve got a giant Koch brothers sized mansion on the Great Lake of Fail.

I’ve never been a republican, but until a decade ago at least you could say they were ruthlessly efficient and competent, even if many of their policies were bunk. Now they don’t even have that.

I suspect, and hope, that turnout in 2014 will be pretty good in places like Florida, where racist voter suppression was high. I get the sense that a great many non-whites, particularly, African-Americans here are pretty damn pissed. They’ve gone through so much not only to get the right to vote, but to actually exercise the right, that I don’t think they’ll forget this shit in two years.

Another positive note is things are likely to be better in 2014 in terms of jobs and the economy. We’re recovering. In 2010, so many people who were excited in 2008 stayed home because they hadn’t received their pony. They didn’t grasp the complete shitheap Obama inherited.

That’s not to say it will be easy or that the frothing nutters will be any less rabid, but we should have some better things going for us.

Of the countless number of words written and broadcast during the past week on the necessity for the Republican party to broaden its constituency, this post is one of the most shrewd and concise arguments I’ve encountered illustrating the likely failure of such efforts.

Once again, you demonstrate why you are the essential front-pager on this site.

I’m fine with being prepared and rational fears, but I do think we go too far in the other direction sometimes. Part of what the Right does is make a lot of noise and scare people. The bluster itself is a part of voter suppression. True the Vote didn’t have “a million “volunteers. They didn’t have “35,000” volunteers, either. Those were the numbers they invented and threw around.
We had 1500 trained voter protection volunteers in Ohio in 2012 and that has taken us 6 years to develop. They recruited and trained 35,000 people in 6 months? Bullshit. I don’t believe it. They may have an email list of 35k people, but 35k actual people on the ground? My ass. These numbers they throw around are meant to scare our voters.

I don’t see how the GOP is going to attract more minorities. They are focusing on the Latinos (completely ignoring African-Americans as usual). As a female Asian friend of mine said about republicans. “They offend me on so many levels, as a woman with the rape talk, as a non white with the racism, as a scientist with their disrespect and contempt for education and science”. This friend was very clear that she can never vote republican because of their insistence on teaching creationism and nonsense about getting rid of PBS. I know it’s a cliche, but Asians do have almost a reverence for education and learning, not exactly republican strong points. In short to appeal to minorities republicans are going to have to become democrats and that is not happening anytime soon.

What with teaching, writing, and arranging Balloon Juice meet-ups, where does the man find the time? But not to worry: I’m quite certain my opinion is of no consequence to Doug-of-many-nyms. And regardless, the indomitable Kay will keep filing illuminating dispatches from the electoral front-lines.

@Kay: Of course, and like I say, your analysis gives me a happy. But this is what happened this time. Will it happen next time? Probably, but there will likely be some changes. And the time after that? Good chance of seeing more changes still. Or these yahoos could just remain this incompetent, or get even more so. I for one don’t want to bet the nation on it, though, and that’s why I say that the possibility that any or all of these electoral political efforts could improve must be taken seriously, and that none of these groups or strategies can be dismissed outright. I suppose it’s a cliche to say that we must always be vigilant, but it’s true.

GOTV is going to be needed – but it’s needed so that Dems can take control at the state level like California has managed this year.

It’s worth pointing out that a lot of the gains for the Democrats this year were the result of a switch from partisan redistricting to a non-partisan citizen’s commission. At the last redistricting, the parties agreed to a terrible (for the Democrats) bargain that set up as many safe districts for existing legislators as possible. Once that gerrymander was overturned, we were in position to pick up a bunch of seats just because they weren’t designed specifically to protect the R incumbent. If other states can use whatever initiative process they have to set up similar non-partisan redistricting, they could do a lot to prevent this kind of gerrymandering in the future.